Recently in Patent & Trademark Category

RIAA was awarded statutory damages of $1.92 M for infringement of 24 MP3s in Capitol Records v  Thomas-Rasset.  This amounts to $80,000 per song file.  The defendent never called her technical expert to testify and her attorneys never challenged the evidence offered by the RIAA's MediaSentry and Doug Jacobson.  Slashdot.org reports:

Also, neither the special verdict form nor the jury instructions spelled out what the elements of a 'distribution' are, or what needed to be established by the plaintiffs in order to recover statutory — as opposed to actual — damages.

Herb Zeman, founder of Luminetz Corp. and inventor of the technology for the company’s products, is the subject of an investigation into the dissemination of trade secrets to a competitor. Zeman owns 4.9 million shares in Luminetx and denies hurting the company he founded saying it would not be in his best interest.  The competitor AccuVein is a New York-based company that this year is launching a smaller product that provides the same function as Luminetx’s VeinViewer, which sells for about $25,000 per unit. Zeman, a physicist and retired professor from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, is the expert witness in the patent infringement lawsuit because the patent is in his name.

For more, see The Memphis Daily News.

US District Court jurors in Austin rejected the College Network Inc. case against Moore Educational Publishing Inc.  The College Network alleged that  iStudySmart.com was infringing upon their registered trademark by placing pay-per-click bids on the words "college" and "network."  CN sought $150,000 in lost profits, claiming the defendant's pay-per-click advertising practices gave them an undue advantage and lured away customers.

"Bidding on a competitor's registered trademark has become common practice in the search engine marketing industry," said Troy Perkins, founder of Totus Internet Visibility Agency, San Antonio TX. The infringement expert witness gave an online demonstration to show the jury how keyword bidding enables companies to gain first page ranking with companies of like products.

For more, see prweb.com.